The insistence by the historically-unaware to refer to "anarchists" and "libertarians" as two distinct historical movements, and usually only to their ridiculous imitations of today, gives me motivation to expose the co-dependent falsifications that each is today.
The Libertarian League, Jewish Anarchist Federation of America, and other groups (esp. in New York from 1910-1970) were created and run by anarchists [=libertarians]!
Here are some of the publications I have in my own library from that era:
- The Principles of Anarchism, written by Dr. J.A. Maryson; translated from the Yiddish by A. Grossner (1935), published by The Jewish Anarchist Federation of America, distributed by the Libertarian League ($.10);
- The Revolutionary Movement in Spain; written by M. Dashar; published by the Libertarian Publishing Society (NY); distributed by the Libertarian League;
- The Labor Party Illusion, written by Sam Weiner (1961), published/distributed by the Libertarian League ($.10);
- Spain, written by A. Souchy (July 19, 1936), published by the Libertarian Publishers (NY) under the auspices of the Anarchist Federation of America;
- Vote What For?, published/distributed (1959) by the Libertarian League ($.05)
- What Is Anarchism?, written by George Woodcock, published/distributed by the Libertarian League ($.05), footnotes sources include William Godwin, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Alexander Berkman, Herbert Read, George Woodcock;
- Ethics and American Unionism, written by Sam Weiner (who under the name "Sam Dolgoff" wrote "Bakunin on Anarchy"), published/distributed by the Libertarian League ($.10)
- Provisional Statement of Principles, published/distributed by the Libertarian League
- Views & Comments of the Libertarian League (news letter and pamphlet series, 1956-1965, name changed to Towards Anarchism in the Summer of 1965).
The term, just like the "anarchist", "free speech", "anti-draft", "situationist", "tea party" movements, was recuperated, stolen, and surrendered from the original and given to a replica[nts]. That is what capital does so well. [The original, White Willow Bark, was subdued as much as could be after the IG Farben favorite, The Bayer Company, patented the replica. The same thing happened to the "union" movement; valerian root is suppressed so that the patented/ Valium may continue its 1000%+ per pill profitability. Mediation and inversion are what the capitalization process does: the passion to create becomes the duty to produce; humans become thing-like while things falsely "walk and talk"; use-value becomes minimized as fictitious-value is maximized.
That inversion is substituted for every original aspect of our lives: our communication, our terminology, our credibility, our experiences, our essence. We become less as our inversion becomes a profitable and trademarked "lifestyle". We are accumulations of trademarks and ownership by capital and its wielders.
Being "united" in fighting wage-labor and capital was intentionally channeled into getting "a greater quantity" of wages for wage-slavery. The IWW was crushed so that the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and Teamsters of today can task out wage-workers like a brothel. The quality of the initial resistance is buried within the jabber of those whose job it is to defuse resitance into a new form of submission to it.
"Less government" is in no way contradictory with "abolishing the state", yet can be seen as suggesting more than an abstract negation of the state as with empty and cliches and slogans. The failure of the movements of the 1900s was in part because they embraced only negation of that whichgenerally "sacrificed the self" and not also forms that generally "affirmed the self". There were movements that formed communes, cooperatives, etc. but today, there is usually only a cynical, black-clad, phony who breaks things while never affirming the creation of non-things.
The following is from http://pediaview.com/openpedia/Libertarian_League:
The Libertarian League was a name used by two American libertarian or social anarchist organisations during the twentieth century.
The first Libertarian League was founded in Los Angeles in 1920. Although mainly anarchist its membership included people from many different political perspectives with the over-riding principle of "equal freedom" and liberty in all aspects of life. It mainly supported co-operative forms of socialism but also some forms of capitalism, particularly small businesses. Reflecting the times [ed by RR: most anarchists were factory workers or sole proprietors (printers, small shopkeepers, butchers, carpenters, plumbers, in family-centered trades, etc.) it was particularly concerned with opposing prohibition and militarism. From 1922 to 1924 it published a journal called The Libertarian. The organisation was unable to maintain its broad coalition of different views and it broke up in the 1930s.
The second Libertarian League was founded in New York City in 1954 as a political organisation building on the Libertarian Book Club. Members included Sam_Dolgoff, Russell Blackwell, Dave Van Ronk", and Murray Bookchin. This league had a narrower political focus than the first, promoting anarchism and syndicalism. Its central principle, stated in its journal Views and Comments, was "equal freedom for all in a free socialist society". Branches of the League opened in a number of other American cities, including Detroit and San Francisco, but it lacked an organisational focus and never managed to establish a presence amongst other anarchist and syndicalist organisations. It was dissolved at the end of the 1960s.
S.R.A.F. (Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation) found the anarchists/libertarians as one, republishing the 1963 Libertarian League text, "What We Stand For, whose first line shows precisely where the influence on groups like For Ourselves (Berkeley), Black & Red (Detroit), Point Blank (San Francisco), Negation (Berkeley), Root & Branch, Situationist International, and Solidarity (London) are commonly-rooted:
The “free” world is not free; the “communist” world is not communist. We reject both: one is becoming totalitarian; the other is already so.
Their current power structure leads inexorably to atomic war and the probable destruction of the human race.
We charge that both systems engender servitude. Pseudo-freedom based on economic slavery is no better than pseudo-freedom based on political slavery.
The monopoly of power which is the state must be eliminated. Government itself, as well as its underlying institutions, perpetuates war, oppression, corruption, exploitation, and misery.
We advocate a world-wide society of communities and councils based on cooperation and free agreement from the bottom (federalism) instead of coercion and domination from the top (centralism). Regimentation of people must be replaced by regulation of things.
Freedom without socialism is chaotic, but socialism without freedom is despotic. Libertarianism is free socialism.
These ideas are expanded upon in the provisional statement of the principles of the Libertarian League and in other literature that will be supplied free on request.
*******
LIBERTARIAN LEAGUE
New York 3, N.Y.
[from
http://radicalarchives.org/2010/05/11/libertarian-league-manifesto/
Now, we hopefully can more clearly sense both "anarchism" and "libertarianism" as moments of each other, fragmented, inverted, and recuperated in both terminology and movement, just like the Democrat and Republican party organizations (which are neither for democracy nor a sovereign republic), so that all history is obscured, obfuscated, obliterated.
Agents of the Realm distribute and manifest the "lifestyled" falsifications of each grassroot socially-formalized [self-]movement, and all resistance becomes servile to the very system it spectacularly "resists" and pretends to be resisting....
Current and intentionally-misused terminology is a moment of the bigger lie. It suppresses, distorts, fragmentizes, and hides us from our own[ership of] history, and history-making subjective power. In many cases it even rejects history entirely (as in the pretense to "objective" deconstructive attacks upon socio-historical connectivity, severing terminological connecting "lines" between the fragmented "dots". The only "objective" is in turning human "subjects" into [state] capital's "objects".
Self-management is the enemy of inversive and invasive mediation, and knows itself to be!
